passionate.vegan.rambling

Top 5

I had planned on posting about my Thanksgiving feast with Husband today, but, things didn’t come together yesterday as I had planned and we’ll be having our feast tonight, so I thought I’d post a couple Top 5 lists today instead. I’ll start with:

Top 5 Favourite Kitchen Accessories/Gadgets:

1) my great-grandma’s wooden spoon. She used it to make so many wonderful dishes in her lifetime and it was passed to me when I moved out on my own. It’s indispensible to me. I use it for everything from simply stirring together dry ingredients to testing the doneness of sauces to serving risotto to packing my smoothie ingredients deep into the bowels of my blender.

2) my vintage Juice King. My mother-in-law found this for me last year at a yard sale. It’s a small quantity, manual citrus juicer. It has chips in the finish and the crank is worn smooth but it does the best job of squeezing oranges, lemons and limes into submission.

3) my 8″ Wusthof classic chef’s knife. Everyone deserves a knife like this. It has perfectly balanced weight, the craftsmanship is unbelievable and the granton edge helps to keep my diced bits from sticking to the blade. I use this several times a day and couldn’t imagine my kitchen without it. Plus, I look totally badass wielding it!

4) my mandolin. I’d been coveting it for eons and Husband finally bought it for me last year for Xmas. It’s responsible for beautiful slaws and salads and making quick work out of heaps of onions without all the tears.

Related to the above list is a little Top 5 I like to refer to as the “Who’s Lamp Do I Gotta Rub To Get Me One Of These” list, or:

Top 5 Items on My Kitchen Wishlist:

1) a Vita-Mix…oh man, I want one soooo bad. I dream about this thing. The soups I could cook! The sorbets I could whip! The grains I could pulverize! There’s almost nothing a Vita-Mix can’t do.

2) Wusthof paring knife. I love my chef’s knife and I use it all the time…even when it really isn’t considered safety-first to use it. For example, I shouldn’t peel apples with it. I also shouldn’t try to dig out the pit of a peach or nectarine with my chef’s knife and these are the times when a good paring knife would really come in handy.

3) a stand mixer. I do a tonne of baking….I make all the birthday cakes for my friends, I follow in my mother’s footsteps and bake at least 20 items every Xmas, I beat a lot of buttercream…and this year when I was making the chocolate buttercream for Husband’s birthday cake (which was epic, by the way…I made a bleeding “Jello” brain and put it in a Zombie head and it oozed something fierce when cut into), my poor little hand mixer finally gave up. I haven’t got around to replacing it and have been beating everything by hand since. A stand mixer would be quite the upgrade!

4) a rotating cake stand. This isn’t a necessity; but, it sure would make decorating cakes and cupcakes easier.

5) a vintage cake carrier. I have a little bit of a fetish for vintage kitchen accessories. I own lots of vintage hand tools (pastry blenders, rusted hand mixers, cookie press kits) and a vintage cake carrier would be the icing on the cake, so to speak. They’re so pretty and actually really functional. It would be much easier to transport all my confections in one than in the boring ol’ Tupperware I currently use.

There you have it! I’m off to try my hand at those pesky vegan eclairs again. Wish me luck and hopefully I’ll be posting about how wonderful they turned out in the very near future!